The Prismatic and Manic Collage Rhythms of Bernice Sokol Kramer
The Prismatic and Manic Collage Rhythms of Bernice Sokol Kramer
The psychologically loaded space created by the astute combination of mixed pre- printed imagery is something to which we have become accustomed since the early decades of the twentieth century. Collage, as it was named, became one of the central aesthetic strategies of Cubism. and through them it became enmeshed in the methodology of many generations of artists. The concept of generating meaning independent of a sinuously drawn line or the structures of painting was especially attractive to new artists who did not hold an academically rigorous ability in either discipline. However, it introduced a discipline of its own which, by inserting the visual culture of both photography and the graphic arts helped break down the barriers between fine and commercial art. Collage has achieved a formalist middle ground in situations where a hybrid image was most suitable. It’s been aided in achieving cultural authority by traditional practitioners who imagined a collage inspired vision different in every way from the context specific painting of eras and centuries past. In truth, collage represents a logical next step in a process of aesthetic development that begins with the senses overpowered and esthetically transformed by the depiction of elemental impressions; then came images of the senses overpowered by machinations of velocity inspired by industrial and technological advancement; and then came the world overpowered by an esthetic in which reality itself became irrevocably splintered and in which scenes depicted with a singular medium became products of a multifaceted and kaleidoscopic genre of imagination. The influence of collage carried over into Dada and Surrealism, in which a hybrid image became the norm, and became proof of the primacy of psychological forces not previously corralled by rational justification. Pop art carried the baton forward again a half century later, with artists actively inspired by a hybridized reality.
Collage today has been transformed by technology yet again, with the advent of social media platforms such as Instagram, which are tailor made to present visual culture. I found the work of Bernice Sokol Kramer there, after meeting her in person at The Governors Island Art Fair in 2019. As I soon learned from seeing her work online, it was solidly idiosyncratic. Nowhere to be found were the recycled tropes of an idealized Surrealist style, generically presenting images that, though they might resemble dreamscapes, were too cozily universal to do more than charm. They could not befuddle nor haunt the viewer as do Sokol Kramer’s works. Hers are a tangle of personal associations so successful mined that they present as universal. The symbols in them are real objects speaking to the gradient of lived experience. They give evidence to a process of introspection in which one seeks a simple reflection only to have an indirect and loaded, emotionally skewed image thrown back at them. Likewise, a writer may desire a certain narrative, but on the page the words take on a life of their own, twisting away from his needs. They will speak the larger truth at all costs. Being that my primary interaction with her work has been via Instagram, I find myself reeling through an endless stream of newly constructed versions from the same well of being. When the artist wants to talk about humanity, she can look no further than her own reflection. In this she is no different from modern masters like Giacometti and Francis Bacon, whose images reflected some element, however morphed by the demands applied to simple vision. Sokol Kramer paints with pictures, some parts of which are originally drawn by her.
Sokol Kramer creates psychologically loaded spaces in small works. The admixture of images sampled and drawn, the projective quality of the images, and a way of pushing them together to use negative space and create visual tension. They work best when depicting a single figure or the view of a single face, though singularity has nothing to do with the effect she achieves. It’s prismatic, creating tangent reflections, like the abstracted faces out of early Cubism. One has to gaze at the whole while allowing the parts to move the eye back and forth, rhythmically, until the manifested details emerge into an image, or an idea of one. There may never be a resulting image, but the impressions she makes are strong. Many of the parts she uses to build her scenes, figures, and faces are part of an emotional register that connects to beauty and body issues from her childhood and adolescence. We focus on these aspects of our appearance and they soon become signs or symbols of who we are. As we age, they change as well, but the memories of these events well up. They remain etched in our character. Emotional scars live inside of us.
The images that populate these collages are myriad in both number and variety. They emerge from every crevice of the artist’s past life, and their selection and ordering, if you can call it that, reflects the raw welter of memory combined with an urgency to give testament to everything that once mattered. Each part represents a fragment of disembodied hubris, a puzzle piece loaded with emotional weight. What results in the final version is not a polite image of life as we know it in passing, like the light from a distant star communicating its end passage. Rather Sokol Kramer transmutes the energy of everything that everything that ever came into contact with her star, and what we receive is an imposed gravity, as if one could be made to feel the weight of walking on it, of seeing life distinctly from that one perspective, taking in the same recollections, breathing the same air, claiming the same scars. Sokol Kramer’s work collaborates with primal energies to give us hyper-conscious knowledge. It’s the depths and heights of what it means to be human that is communicated. For whoever looks into the abyss of her vision will see many things they recognize. What is most evident in their construction is a certain energy or rhythm, like a musical composition or a physical dance, enacted using images to push us into a prismatic territory of our emotional imagination.
